Sunday, July 5, 2015

SOUND SYSTEM SUNDAY: Operation Ivy - Sound System

So I figure maybe every Sunday I’ll look back and post a song from my D&D playing era (or, probably in many cases, earlier). I know very well what my first D&D experience was—a relatively short-lived Keep on the Borderlands expedition run by my cousin in which my thief character nearly died fighting an NPC elf that was somehow a member of our party—but I don’t know if that was 1982 or 1983. I have two different memories that contradict each other: first, being tired but having trouble falling to sleep as my mind raced with thoughts of goblins and hobgoblins in the apartment my family lived in while I was in third-to-fourth grade; second, my mom on the phone in the kitchen and me answering her from the dining room saying I want to play a thief character in the apartment my family lived in while I was in fourth-to-fifth grade. My other early memory is talking about D&D with a classmate out in front of school early one morning, listening in half disbelief as he spoke of rangers and monks(!); that may have been in fourth grade, so that doesn’t really help. Anyway, my era goes up to 1988, possibly early 1989, at which point my friends and I began making fun of how D&D seemed to have denigrated into “check to see if your next breath is successfully taken” (yeah, probably more our fault). My first Sunday Sound System post is more SLC Punk than D&D, but I heard it on the local college radio station the other day and it took me right back to that era and some of the same people I played my last a couple of D&D games with, and, well, it inspired the whole idea behind this post.